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People Can Say What They Want, But Historically, Feminism In The Dominican Republic Has Been Extremely Strong. I Guess The Best Way Of Saying It Is That No One Could Have Survived What We Survived - Whether It Was First Extermination And Slavery, Then Abandonment And Erasure, Then The Series Of Gunboat Two-bit Dictatorships, Followed By The Final Apotheosis Of Dictatorships, The Trujillato. You Couldn't Survive It Without The Resistance Of This Kind Of Woman.

-Junot Diaz

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People Can Say What

Junot Diaz

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People Can Say What They Want, But Historically, Feminism In The Dominican Republic Has Been Extremely Strong. I Guess The Best Way Of Saying It Is That No One Could Have Survived What We Survived - Whether It Was First Extermination And Slavery, Then Abandonment And Erasure, Then The Series Of Gunboat Two-bit Dictatorships, Followed By The Final Apotheosis Of Dictatorships, The Trujillato. You Couldn't Survive It Without The Resistance Of This Kind Of Woman.

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Of Course We All Know That's Not How Life Works. The Novel That Is Our Life Can End At Any Time. Sometimes Even On Page One.

Students Teach All Sorts Of Things But Most Importantly They Make Explicit The Courage That It Takes To Be A Learner, The Courage It Takes To Open Yourself To The Transformative Power Of Real Learning And That Courage I Am Exposed To Almost Every Day At Mit And That I'm Deeply Grateful For.

The Anti-immigrant Logic Has Basically Saturated Our World. I'm Staying, And I'm Fighting.

I'm Really Into The Rights Of Immigrants, The Rights Of The Working Poor. I'm One Of Those Little Activist Types. I Probably Would Have Just Gone To Law School. And The Scary Part Is That I Was One Of Those Kids Who Always Tested Really Well. You Put A Test In Front Of Me, And I Would Have Been Like Do-do-do-do-do. I Probably Would Have Been Some Community Lawyer Somewhere - If Anything, That's Probably What I Would Have Been Doing.

I Find Reading To Be A Delight, A Source Of Comfort, A Way To Explore.

We Can Speculate. Last Time I Checked, The Future Doesn't Take My Advice.

When I Became My Masked Identity I Was This Incredible Little Nerd, But In The Real World I Had To Be This Tough Kid From The Neighborhood.

I Was Really Drawn To Thinking About The Women In My Life. Thinking About My Mother, Who's A Very Powerful Force On Me. And I Have These Two Very Strong Sisters Who Took Up A Lot Of Imaginary Space In My Life.

Books Don't Live And Die By Awards. You Don't Listen To An Hector Lavoe Album Because It Won Some Awards.

You Ask Everybody You Know: How Long Does It Usually Take To Get Over It? There Are Many Formulas. One Year For Every Year You Dated. Two Years For Every Year You Dated. It's Just A Matter Of Will Power: The Day You Decide It's Over, It's Over. You Never Get Over It.

I Don't Think You Can Be From The Caribbean And Not Know A Certain Amount About The Apocalypse.

You Whispered My Full Name And We Fell Asleep In Each Other's Arms And I Remember How The Next Morning You Were Gone, Completely Gone, And Nothing In My Bed Or The House Could Have Proven Otherwise.

I Spent My Entire Childhood Feeling Like A Freak Because I Liked To Read. It's Just Like, "eh, No One Else Likes To Read But Me; I Must Be Crazy!"

Instead Of Lowering Your Head And Copping To It Like A Man, You Pick Up The Journal As One Might Hold A Bady's Beshattered Diaper, As One Might Pinch A Recently Benutted Condom. You Glance At The Offending Passages. Then You Look At Her And Smile A Smile Your Dissembling Face Will Remember Until The Day You Die. Baby, You Say, Baby, This Is Part Of My Novel. This Is How You Lose Her.

[donald] Trump Is Explained With The Intersection Of A Number Of Things: Our Economic Crisis, The Way It's Easier To Blame Immigrants, With The Happenstance That He Discovered That By Bashing Latino Immigrants And Characterizing Them As "rapists" And "murderers" And "scumbags," Suddenly He's Got This Groundswell Of Support From A Group Of People Who Were Raised On This Vocabulary.

Here At Last Is Her Smile: Burn It Into Your Memory; You Won't See It Often.

New Jersey For Me Is So Alive With History. It's Old, Dynamic, African-american, Latino.

African American

Shot At Twenty-seven Times - What A Dominican Number.

It's Never The Changes We Want That Change Everything.

I Can Always Tell If Someone's From Harvard Because They Trot Out Their Vitae. I Would Die At Harvard.

I Never Hear White Writers Get Asked, 'do You Worry About How You Represent White People?'

In Order To Write The Book You Want To Write, In The End You Have To Become The Person You Need To Become To Write That Book.

Run A Hand Through Your Hair, Like The White Boys Do, Even Though The Only Thing That Runs Easily Through Your Hair Is Africa.

So The Kind Of Boy I Was, Or That I Was Told To Be, You Were Kind Of This Like Half-gladiator, Half-dude Who, You Know, Was Supposed To Have As Many Girls As Possible And Work Until Your Heart Exploded, Have No Fear, You Know.

I Think That America Is Such An Incredibly Dynamic Place Because Of Immigration. We Fundamentally Have Been A Culture That's Been Put Together From The Explosions Of Other Cultures. But It's Hard For Us To See. We Have Blinded Ourselves To The Reality Of What Our Country Is.

If We Do Not Begin To Practice The Muscles Of Having A Possessive Investment In Each Other's Oppressions, Then We Are In Some Serious Trouble.

It Might Interest You That Just As The U.s. Was Ramping Up Its Involvement In Vietnam, Lbj Launched An Illegal Invasion Of The Dominican Republic (april 28, 1965). (santo Domingo Was Iraq Before Iraq Was Iraq.)

The Prisoner's Wife Echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming Of The Bones In The Urgency In Which It Reminds Us Of The Possibility Of Love Even Amidst The Ruins. This Is A Terrifying, Heart-breaking And, Ultimately, Important Book.

I Think Men Spend So Much Time Passing For Being Men. There's A Sense Among Many Writers Of Color That The Most Invisible Figure That Was Sitting Between All Of Us Was The Nerd. But It Was The Thing We Weren't Saying, That People Were Afraid To Say, Like, "yo, What We Do Is Nerdy By Definition."

For Me I Was Always A Smart Nerdy Kid. I Wasn't The Smartest And I Wasn't The Nerdiest, But I Was A Smart Nerdy Kid My Whole Childhood, And I Definitely Wanted To Be Somehow Involved With Reading The Rest Of My Life, And I Came From A Community, I Lived In A Community, I Was Part Of A Community Where Reading Was Considered Completely Alien.

...one Of Those Very Bad Men That Not Even Postmodernism Can Explain Away.

I Was In Fact Pretty Much - By The Larger Culture, By The Local Culture, By People Around Me, By People On Tv - Encouraged To Imagine Women As Something Slightly Inferior To Men.

Instead Of Finding Himself In Nerd Heaven—where Every Nerd Gets Fifty-eight Virgins To Role-play With—he Woke Up In Robert Wood Johnson With Two Broken Legs And A Separated Shoulder, Feeling Like, Well, He'd Jumped Off The New Brunswick Train Bridge.

My Thing Is, I'm Just Way Too Harsh. It's An Enormous Impediment, And That's Just The Truth Of It. It Doesn't Make Me Any Better, Make Me Any Worse, It Certainly Isn't More Valorous. I Have A Character Defect, Man.

Poor Oscar. Without Even Realizing It He'd Fallen Into One Of Those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, The Bane Of Nerdboys Everywhere. These Relationships Were Love's Version Of A Stay In The Stocks, In You Go, Plenty Of Misery Guaranteed And What You Got Out Of It Besides Bitterness And Heartbreak Nobody Knows. Perhaps Some Knowledge Of Self And Women.

Ybon Was The One Who Suggested Calling The Wait Something Else. Yeah, Like What? Maybe, She Said, You Could Call It Life.

What Else She Doesn't Know: That The Man Next To Her Would End Up Being Her Husband And The Father Of Her Two Children, That After Two Years Together He Would Leave Her, Her Third And Final Heartbreak, And She Would Never Love Again.

New Jersey Is To New York What Santo Domingo Is To The United States. I Always Felt That Those Two Landscapes, Not Only Just The Landscapes Themselves But Their Relationships To What We Would Call 'a Center' Or 'the Center Of The Universe,' Has In Some Ways Defined My Artistic And Critical Vision.

If You Really Want A Prize, Or If You Really Want Applause, You Should Try To Write As Many Books As Humanly Possible.

I Think A Lot Of The Most Interesting Immigrant Writing Involves Stepping Outside Of That Old, Dreary Binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker Is A Great Example. Same Goes For Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

And That's When I Know It's Over. As Soon As You Start Thinking About The Beginning, It's The End.

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Charles Barkley

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